Wednesday, December 21, 2005

While I was doing my research I pretty much ignored Chile and in fact I have completely ignored Gabriela Mistral because I figure everyone else has written about her already, and she's well known. Ultimately I have to go and read her poems and read something about her life - in fact, probably I'm being stupid and there's a biography of her out there in English that would be easy for me to find, with pointers to lots of other good poets.

My poet this week has been Olga Acevedo, a Chilean born around 1895. Acevedo fits firmly with the other women I've been translating, all the ones who are "not quite modernists". Well what if they're not? Why not call them something else? Because there was definitely something. Why not call it a genre? For god's sake.

My special favorite, Juana de Ibarbourou, doesn't fit strict definitions of modernismo in her early work mostly because she's not quite rigorous and formal enough. I read somewhere in an interview with her that until after her second book, she didnt' even know what a sonnet was. She'd read plenty of them, and written them, but had never studied the rules of verse. (All the poets did not study the rules of verse, but the ladies DO roll their eyes.) She just DID it - but slightly "wrong".

Back to Acevedo. I got very excited at her early poems. Acevedo mentions silence a lot. There's a lot of not-speaking, and dot-dot-dot ellipses, ghosts and statues that can't speak but who want to speak and paradoxically ARE speaking through the poem. The sort of poem that goes like this, "I'm totally mute, I'm a statue, I can't speak! Oh, the sadness!" (Not an actual line.) It's a beautiful rhetorical strategy that makes me aware of all the things they're not saying. Despite my writing ALL THE TIME there is plenty I'm not saying and can't say because of social convention or attempts to be private -- and I don't always feel comfortable with that. Show me a wall and I want to break it. Reflex! But these early 20th century women, their silent speaking statues are all talking to Rodó, in response to his essay "Ariel" in which a philosopher explains to his students (gatherred around a statue of Ariel) all about their duty as artists.

I wondered about the phrase "la tristeza de ser", which was in quotes in Acevedo's poem "Serenata". Is it a quotation/translation from French? Or Kierkegaard? I could translate it as "existential despair" but I'm not sure if I want to be anachronistic if it's an anachronism. If you're going to say "sadness of being" you might as well say "existential despair". Anyway, Acevedo's angst is expressed thusly: She's passionately addressing a ray of pure white moonlight as it streams into her room, and she wants to hide her face in its gauzy negligee and melt away into perfumed nothingness like a ravished bride. Hot stuff!

In other early poems by Acevedo, I noticed a lot of blue which is now a red flag, or really a blue flag, for me that something is going on about Art and Poetry with capital letters. Anything that's blue, or anything about fountains or swans, and the poet is definitely talking to/about Darío and "Azul" -- and so is addressing the ideas of modernismo; the poem should be read in the context of modernismo whether you "count" it or not in that genre. Pure art, inspiration, beauty -- Beauty -- as a way of being. These women, these adherents of maenidismo, saw themselves as living their lives as art. I feel like the more I read, the more I am in their dream-world. Edith Södergran is there -- and the Comtesse de Noailles -- and I'm sure so many more from other countries and languages. I want to put my Latin American women together with them in a lovely anthology, someday, to show the connections.

My own dreamworld is still this imaginary, beautiful data structure of all the texts in the world. I want it to be easy to see relationships between books. I want people to be viewable as nebulous clouds of text-production and consumption or maybe those are the wrong words; texts and people have conversations and relationships.

How much happier I am to be putting all this out into the world, instead of just in private notebooks! And not to be a lonely super-reader autodidact freak anymore. I mean, I still am, but the value of it is different once I'm not talking to the air.

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

I'm glued to Naomi Mitchison's wartime diaries, in a volume called "Among You Taking Notes..." I'd read her Memoirs of a Spacewoman and Travelling Light but until the amazing feminist scholar and reader Lesley Hall mentioned Mitchison's non-fiction and diaries, I had no idea she was a renowned autobiographer.

To me her wartime diaries read like a blog. I get that same sense of intimacy, of the fullness of someone else's life, without much exposition. I have to work to fill in gaps and figure out who's who. (There is a handy glossary, and the book was edited well, with footnotes interspersed.) Apparently Mitchison was part of a project called Mass-Observation, which among other things got people to keep diaries during times of social change and war. I'm very curious about this project. She refers to it sometimes as "like therapy" so I wonder what her participation was other than to write the diary and mail it off to the Mass-Obs. people? There is mention that her diaries and letters were intercepted by the Home Office as a matter of course, read, copied by hand, and pertinent facts noted. "Shall remember that anything I say may be noted. I may be able to do a certain amount that way." To note things on purpose that local people might need in hopes that politicians might help.

She's in her early 40s... has 4 children off at school, a houseful of evacuees and refugees, in fact responsibility on some level for a townful of them, hundreds... writing... domestic and farming arrangements... poaching fish with the poachers for fun... and she lost her newborn baby, a heart defect, very sad. Her feelings about this recorded as faithfully as any mommyblogger's. Occasional writerly crisis and freakout over the war, like this one from 7 Aug 1941:

I do feel like hell; it is partly being tired, partly that I feel so stupid; I can't concentrate, I forget facts, I can't read a serious book.... I make serious blunders about this war. I don't know anything properly. If I'm no good I may as well do manual work and wear myself out, it doesn't matter; I wish I knew if this was age or something physical or the beginning of some kind of mental decay or what. I so much want someone to be awfully nice to me for a long time. Oh someone that I love, stand up and crown me. And I get like screaming when all these girls talk at once. How can one write when one feels like that? I can remember now the things that Denny M. said to me yesterday about writing but what the hell; he is stupider than I am, it doesn't matter what he says. It's no fun being merely one-eyed in the country of the blind. Damn.

From someone so literate and hard-working and politically committed, a successful novelist, poet, and renowned intellectual, whose life was so full and who lived to be a hundred and one ... It means a lot to me to see her low moments. It buoys me up not because of any schadenfreude at a successful person's moments of pain, but because I know that these moments are inevitable and I shoudl not measure my own life by its low points. I admire Naomi Mitchison for her exposure of life's messiness and complexity.

And that line, so beautiful, "Oh someone that I love, stand up and crown me." Her diary entries are keenly perceptive of other women's work, of women who are trying to have jobs or be writers or to survive and care for a family and whose work never ends, never has a stopping point or a congratulation, who "spend all their time caring for and petting others and who I would dearly love to pet as they are so in need of it." Sometime during 1941 she noted that she would like to take everyone in turn in the village -- a small herring-fishery village in west Scotland -- and give them a day off in bed with tea and the nicest service. She agonizes over her own luxuries... I like her immensely.

Reading her diaries makes me think of E. Nesbit, Edward Eager, of course Narnia, and other childrens' books that are steeped in 30s and 40s England and the changing times. The ways that wartime and post-war books have a lustful focus on what the children have for tea struck me as odd when I was little, until I realized there was a butter and sugar ration. And the morals of children in E. Nesbit focus around nobly helping, social levelling, and gender equity - because she was a Fabian and a socialist, a feminist and believer in free love. Like Mitchison seems to have been.

I was struck by this quote from September 1939, the start of the war:

I think one sees things more vividly, storing them up, insisting on the moment, at these times. If one is wise. During the last war, when I was a girl, I felt all the time that it was wrong ever to be happy; now I think one should be when possible. It was the kind of day one could carry into the trench or a concentration camp, in one's mind.... We took care not to shoot the pheasants; it seems odd, when men are shooting one another in Europe, and when we may be much more directly involved in that ourselves, yet I htink it is probably a good idea to be punctilious at the moment about small and silly rules which are not part of this totalitarian plan which is eating us now.

Elsewhere she brings up the possibility that most democratic or humanist rights and freedoms, most civil liberties, will disappear during wartime; that it is in enclaves like her village with its discussion groups and Labour meetings and plays that ideas of freedom will survive. They won't be in textbooks; newspapers were censored and suppressed. Italian, Austrian, and german immigrants and refugees were being interned in England and shipped to Canada or Australia. One ship with I think 1500 internees was sunk by a German submarine, crossing the Atlantic, full of Italians... her friend's doctor and his wife were on that ship... It's a good reality check to compare Mitchison's take on WWII to the wartime we are in.

Where are the memoirs and histories now, right now, of the Muslim people being detained illegally by our own government? I hope they are on blogs and I'll be able to find them and read them.

Mitchison often wonders about being detained or exiled or put in a concentration camp herself especially if England were invaded. I certainly think about it too for myself - the tide could turn very suddenly in the U.S. to a paranoid and totalitarian dictatorship, as our President says in public that he is above the law. How wistfully I think of Al Gore and his stiff yet heartfelt statements about "The Rule of Law" the day after the election was decided with transparent unfairness.

Thursday, December 08, 2005

I come up against this again and again. Critical literature focuses on defining a genre, and women end up just outside that definition. So it always looks like they just miss the boat because they're not quite good enough. Really, though, if you look at the moments when the genre is being defined, the boundaries are arbitrary. Other genres could be declared.

I need to read more widely...

So check this out.

With respect to her poetry in particular, critics have often failed to recognize the modernity of its lyric voice on account of its traditional verse patterns. Reflecting a dual attitude of competition and cooperation with her cultural world, Noailles held a similarly double-voiced discourse toward conventional interpretations of woman. Her classification in literary history as a belated French Romantic further obfuscates the significance of her work. While recognizing her predecessors, Noailles was frequently unable to find adequate models in their works for a distinct poetic identity. In seeking new versions of the feminine self, she acknowledged women who were unable to write and, more broadly, she attempted to provide a formerly silent Muse with voice and presence. (Catherine Perry)

She's not quite a romantic... or she's a "late" romantic... but she's not quite a modernista either - like de Ibarbourou, Bernal, Vaz Ferreira, Elisa Monge, Mercedes Matamoros, and so many women poets of the 1890s to the 1920s.

A discrepancy between form and content, reflecting Noailles' situation at the cusp of the antithetical world views of nineteenth-century Romanticism and twentieth-century Modernism, characterizes her poetry, where dynamic concepts and images strive to dissolve a largely classical structure. By actively engaging with her French literary heritage while finding a source of inspiration in Greek paganism and in Nietzsche's radical thought, Noailles constructed an original poetic world view. Her work is best described as Dionysian--ecstatic, sensual, erotic, playful, sometimes violent, and always marked by a tragic undercurrent which becomes more apparent in her later poetry.

"Dionysian" describes Agustini, de Ibarbourou, Bernal, and Matamoros very well. I would prefer a different name if we are going to declare a new genre... Imagine the articles as we define Maenidic poetics and make brief offhand mention of Ruben Darío - and how he doesn't quite fit the Genre. A pity, really, as his work contained echos of Maenidism, traces which can't help but reflect the prevailing spirit of the time.

***It occurs to me that I have had a giant epiphany about this, but I'm reinventing the wheel. I did a little poking around and found this excellent bibliography: Gender and Genre. My god! right up top we have "Benstock, S. (1991). Textualizing the feminine. On the limits of genre. University of Okla. Press." Looks perfect! I'm still 15 years behind in academic literary theory. Though I think it might be more like "feminizing the textual" than "textualizing the feminine" - that's what's going on in a lot of the criticism I'm reading. The poets are textualizing the feminine. The critics feminize in order to denigrate and marginalize. *sigh*

I had been looking forward to this reading of Not Dead Yet Poets' Society, and had planned for it, but my childcare options suddenly fell through on two levels. John was late, my neighbor had a complication, and so I had to stuff Milo into his raincoat, boots, whisk him off unwelcome and harried and late to the reading at the Main Street Gallery in the dimly awakening nightlife of Redwood City. Instead of composing my mind to think of my poem or even having a moment to practice I was answering questions from him about the night, the city, the gallery, Main Street, What Is an Art Gallery. Then questions about him, some from well-meaning people, some NOT. Oh, the little disapprovals and snideries! Out late, isn't he? Is he going to be a Good Boy? You do understand that a child can be Distracting? I hope you can keep him Quiet. He knows not to touch anything, right? Rather than focus on the people I would like to talk to, I have to keep my mind focused on my son and his experience. Yes, people, I do understand that a child can be distracting. What do you think?

The temptation to answer everyone with flippant rudeness... running a spectrum from "oh, fuck off already" to "Actually, as you have correctly discerned, I am the sort of unwed teenage mother who feeds my child on diet pepsi, goldfish crackers, twinkies, and crack cocaine, and I encourage him to scream as loud as possible during poetry readings in fancy art galleries with delicate breakable Art made of glass, to express my punk rock disrespect for you and all your ilk. By the way, he has double pneumonia." Well, I held my tongue, Milo quietly read Asterix in the corner, and John showed up just before the reading was about to start, since the rain and lack of chairs and large crowd delayed the reading for 20 minutes or so. Thank god!

Now that that's off my chest! Whew! It's a blog, so I get to say whatever I want!

The room was packed. Way more so than usual for the NYDPS. Really the cream of the peninsula poets came to hear and be heard. Forgive me for saying that... (Or don't.)

Jayne Kos hosted the reading, and we kicked off with some tributes to Anatole Lubovich. Kathy St. Claire wrote in talking about Anatole's attempt to write the shortest poem possible that would express the essence of cats: "Cat sits." James Lee or James Li wrote in from Sacramento with a poem about stars. "Stars are maps to the soul" ...that sort of thing. Bruce Jewett - who sometimes sends me poetry postcards and who used to publish small books and magazines in the.. 70s? 80s? I think the Fat Frog... talked about how Anatole was vibrant with verve but how they were oil and water.

Jayne then read parts of Arntson's introduction. It was funny and sort of touching when in her inimitable kindergarten-teacher style she said that many things were important influence on him, including "The Burning Man" said with a strangely wrong emphasis as people normally say it with no "the" and the "ing" elided so that it's trocheed, equal stress, BURN(uh) MAN. (Like saying "house boat" or "tow truck". The lights went off. There were xmas lights, and EL wire in a long coiling tangle on the floor, and some zappy globes making you think of the beauty of neon in the rain. All cheesy and half-assed, but in a good way that gave us beauty and atmosphere... dislocation. Arntson in his fez and pakistani-looking tunic thing. (Salwar kameez? I can't remember the name of it. ) A little tinsel and vaudeville. Two radios, one with swing music and one with a crackly broadcast of the Day that will live in Infamy... Fellow Americans... Pearl Harbor.. the pearl that fell into the ocean. Remarks from Arntson.

First - "She saw a ghost" which was brilliant and lovely... a somewhat halting start until he got into the swing of it. You have to rememeber he recites it all from memory and he recited for probably 40 minutes nonstop. An ode to saltines, clouds, ghosts, journeys, exhaustion physical and spiritual. His poems just keept going. You realize, "Oh. There is no reason to stop here," and keep writing. This was one of the main head-opening lessons for me when I first started hearing Steve read at Waverley and San Jose Arts League at the minor street house. I wrote the essay "On Stopping" and began to push myself beyond - a push also helped by Diane Di Prima.

This little bit of the poem is not formatted properly. It should be rambling all over the page with a lot of white space, staggered and open-handed. Maybe I will come back later and try to do it correctly. (It's time consuming with HTML.)

tired of all that waking stateshe started to dream before she sleptAnd her dream was our own on the way to the lakequalified by crackersnourished by those same saltines of sodium and chlorinepacked for just this occasion of reconnaissance and homelessnessSo the scenery is hauntedin spite of better knowingthe night as eclipse collapsing the sun on a diet of corn starchseeing all the way to the starsthe last she saw before they saw HERlike rock n roll psychedelia staring backshe thought a city to have receded with all of the suneast to westside goneshe is of the cult of the newcomer to all this terrainincluding cloudsas beautifulas the right idea at the very right timethe sky is royally appointedtherefore she things of her angels throughout the eveningand angels there may be, conveningallowed just enough substance to startle the mortaltraveller gone crackers-giddy in the twilight

and the answer: "Pai-ute" : "water-there"And thus a people are namedfor a direction you take to slake a thirstAnd now t his witching for water in the darkWaterboarding to blue tremolo of trembling shoreso that you shudder with the cheddarcollide with nabisco, the cracker too delicateto last the length of joltingShe studies the ghhost and ourselvescompeting tangibilitiesthe relative corporealit is as if the wind had determined to be visiblebeyond its agitations of botany

The deal is, you stay with it, and sometimes you can't and you spin off into your own thoughts sparked by listening. That spacing out is okay. It takes practice to absorb and stay with a long poem. But you are reeled back in by some strand coming back. The cracker comes back and combines with cloud, or the Paiutes with water and its lack and the ghost and your attention is caught. The point of the long poem is that it is not a painting; it is a journey and you not only end up somewhere, you have travelled somewhere. Arntson's poems are road trips of the mind. You can sit next to him in the car and enjoy the journey. You can pull off the road or space out - that's the beauty of the trip.

He read "Wadsworth" - a long poem about an abandoned school. Beautiful!

Shark Car, which me and Rob Pesich published in the "Cuts from the Barbershop" anthology.

And Mousetrap, to which I wondered what percent of the room got what it was about.

Well, I could go on praising his poetry and giving examples but I'd like to give that more time and energy than I have available this moment.

He passed out (free) a CD with three poems on it. Good quality recordings, but the music is intrusive and cheesy. Alas! How can this be? He's a good musician... but must have had a blind moment or just loves his friend the cheesy-keyboard player.

To the open mike. April, Palmer Pinney with a sort of holiday poem, a couple of other people read, but I was not fully there. I read the first bit of "The Dead Girlfriend of Novalis" not really at my best. Later Jayne pointed out that I said "amApolas" instead of "amaPOlas" ... er! whoops! I think because it sounds greek. But of course she is right! Bruce read a poem. Judith B. read a long poem about acorn woodpeckers, who live communally. Mary-Marcia Casoly read a poem "stay wild" about the sky and ocean.

Then the Saturday Poets crowd, all together:Amy McLennan ... ghost ships. Lisa Ortiz read an astonishingly good poem about cookies, desire, and martinis. I have written before that she is the ultimate celebrator of profundity in the suburban mundane, distilling it beautifully... dark in your bitter parts, bitter in your dark. The fierce YES of the crinkling insomniac cookie bag. More people should listen carefully to what she is doing. Robert H. "People said he had crazy eyes..." Amy Miller - In the century where nothing happened - another brilliant poem. I have trouble reading my own handwriting but I exploded into note taking with a lot of exclamation points and little stars on the page. "They washed the murals off the walls..." Quite good. A science-fiction poet and I expect to see more of her stuff out there... I wish I had a copy of this poem.

JC Watson - "for family". "old friendship an ancient car/something always coming loose." As always, good. Once at a readaround we took turns reading her poems in our varying reading styles. Because sometimes her delivery style blinds you a little. It's very powerful. But the poems can be VERY different read aloud by someone else. It was instructive. It was also cool to hear her do one of my poems HER way.

Christine Holland - a poem about a painting of native americans - history - painting - colonialism - solid. I started thinking of John McPhee. She is the John McPhee of poetry? Hmmm. I'm not sure if that would please or insult her but it's what I was thinking and I meant it as a compliment. She paints and extends vision. David Cummings in faultless flowing rhythm - "and I think of Blake's other law," - really a technical master and a builder of complex thought.

Charlotte talked about Anatole, a heartfelt cascade of feelings about how he was quite amazing, cosmopolitan, cultured, bizarre and fantastic, somewhat unappreciated because he was difficult and prickly as well. A story about having dinner with him and fearing death by food poisoning because the food was in the fridge but the fridge didn't actually function as a fridge... And he is quite stubborn and of course no way to convey to him that maybe chicken should be kept particularly cold. Charlotte really is grasping over saying something between a (self and other) reproach and a confession of love for us all as a community, that... she didn't realize until he was gone how much she would miss him, this person almost a stranger whose work she has known for so many years, seen once, twice a month at Events... And that maybe we all are that important to each other and that is as it should be - but how to recognize it? What does it mean? That's what I felt she was saying.

Patrick Daly - read a poem of Anatole's. I riffled through a couple of magazines but he chose the best poem of Anatole's from that selection ' "Grey Hereafter Ever After" and I did not want to read one that was an order of magnitude less interesting (all the others.) A poem castigating the "grey breath" of hedonophobes. Anatole at his best when formal and technical and exquisitely clever. I like his sonnets. I am not a neoformalist or any kind of formalist, but I enjoy formality when other people do it well, and I don't give a rat's ass what's in fashion. As if we are limited by time! Bah humbug!

Steve Arntson stood up again to recite (from almost-memory) a sonnet of Substance by Anatole. "When I consider the things that swirl through space...' ..."I am amazed that I can reach this far..." Alas, I cannot memorize a poem or even write fast enough to keep up. I could have typed fast enough to capture most of it, but was not quick on the draw with the laptop.Arntston passed out a packet of poems, some typed, some xeroxed from his manuscripts. This made me so happy! I begged him and begged him to do it! And he did, huzzah! I want everyone to appreciate his genius.

Everyone cleaned up, and left quickly... and Arntson was off to take the train to his night watchman job at a huge downtown building, a granite palace where he makes Tchaikovsky echo off the dimensions of Solomon's Temple.

A great, memorable reading!

I always take brief notes and looking back on them can rememeber and reconstruct most of an evening. I feel self-conscious to type it up with everyone's names... but I hope they enjoy coming across it if they do some vanity googling.

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

I can't do justice to the great readings tonight. I'm sort of cranky from ulcers and a long, long day. So instead... you get this.

As I drove home I was stuck with the thought of how much I love judging and discernment. I can't stop doing it. I realize it's obnoxious and sometimes out of place or unwelcome. I get such a kick out of hearing samples of the same people's work over time. I'm always thinking, "Ah! This is a good one! Much better than last month's workshopped-to-death thing that had all the edges smoothed off it!" or "Hmm, this is maybe the 6th time I've heard this person read, and now I have a handle on Their Trip. And yet tonight is different - they're doing something unlike what they've done before." So I compare people to themselves.

And of course comparing them to each other. I put people in categories, fuzzy ones, but I know I'm still ranking, ordering, grouping, looking for connections.

Rhymed doggerel about driving to work being stuck in traffic, or angst about one's own body fluids, or ... well, imagine your personal poetic hell in this space. Gosh darn it, at least that villanelle about chopping carrots on a granite countertop while bluebirds sing in the garden and Hurricane Katrina victims are eaten by crocodiles, at least it's the best villanelle it can possibly be. Since I don't want to live in a state of irony and snark (as I was dipping into just now with the imaginary Katrina carrots) I try to be analytical and fair-minded instead. With critical faculties turned up past 11, I'm guaranteed some entertainment.

Unfortunately... around the poetry-reading time of night, I am usually in some sort of fairly intense physical pain. The only way to deal with that is to think as hard as possible, for distraction.

Judgement is also a defense mechanism against boredom. Because I catch on quickly and people are often stunningly predictable... I can amuse myself during moments of literary tedium by making up theories, or considering what exactly makes it tedious and wondering why it isn't tedious to everyone or what factors people are enjoying or what it means for the person who wrote it. Value IS relative in many ways. I have to dislocate the center of my judgement in order to get to the place where I can understand that relativity and see poetry newly. Yet... some writing still sucks and is dull. To me. For my purposes. At this particular moment. Oh, I could argue all day about this!

I'm not judging every second and in fact at some point during a poem I can abandon judgement or make my decision quickly and sit back to enjoy the ride, whatever that ride is. I can stop being Elitist McSnootypants for a brief moment, but then it kicks right back in afterwards.

When something is good...I am SO happy, relieved, excited, and inspired. Like Steve Arntson's recitations tonight... and I would especially mention the open mike readings by Lisa Ortiz, Amy Miller, David Cummings, JC Watson... others. Like I said, I will check in tomorrow and write up the reading by Arntson and others. And in the next few days I'll talk more about Anatole's work and the tributes to Anatole we heard tonight; I hope with examples of his poetry. Charlotte lent me some journals from 12 years ago and I look forward to reading early... or earlier... poetry by various poets I've been hearing around town since 2001.

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

From last Friday. I can't transcribe all my notes, but I thought it might be fun to mention the people who read.

Intro by Karen Grosman.

WillyKit - her first time reading here. We all applaud and give her The Love. "Shepherded".Tony - poem about the Mekong riverAnita Holzburg - "Chances"Jayne Kos - "Road Trip" Charlotte Muse - I don't have a title but it was something memoir-ish. I often really enjoy Charlotte's pensive musings.Karen GrosmanBrucey Slama - poem about the Holocaust.Jackie Marderossian - Abomb, steamer trunk, small girl named Yoko, Magritte's attitude towards objects. I follow Jackie's work with interest. She experiments quite hardworkingly with form and subject material and I always think she is on the edge of finding a solid voice. Sometimes she catches the bus and sometimes not. More and more often, yes.Steven Riddle - a quirky poem and I am not sure if he said "K9 Down" or "Canine Down" or something else, but I thought of that William Burroughs poem where he starts rambling about "Pilot K9, you are cut off." A really wonderful last line in this poem that I wish I had written down or retained but it had something to do with marigolds and calendula.Mel - the guy I think of as "The Anchorman". A poem, rhyming & hilarious, to Anatole Lubovich.Lu Pettus - grandchild in front of the mirror. Good. blank verse. Or, dips in and out of blank verse. Lu usually writes long narrative fantasy poems that seem to be set in some kind of consistent mythical world of her own invention. This mirror poem is a departure from that and it is quite good.Rob N. - A villanelle. Kachina's keep. Tom Digby - Christmas on Terra. I always enjoy Digby's flights of fancy. They are not "good" poems by literary snootypants standards and are often prosy, a thing which normally bugs me. But in his case it doesn't bug me. They are vignettes and explorations of a wacky idea - in a way that entertains. (Therefore they ARE good.) Often people quietly roll their eyes or don't know what to make of his stuff. Sharon Olson - she reads "Blood Soup". (Which was in Composite#2). I think last year Sharon joined the Sixteen Rivers collective. Her work is meditative, page-poety, naturey. I think of Sharon, Charlotte, Jean Chacona, Christine Holland, Patrick Daly, David Cummings, and some others as representative of the core of Waverley's thing. Thing. But it's a tight, odd community and in so many ways I'm an outsider in it. I think there are people who have been poeting and workshoping together for 20 years and I never understand those nuances. And for god's sake, their work is so good, but it seems like it never gets published anywhere, which makes me crazy when so much inferior work gets published. Anyway - Sharon also is a founder and organizer for the Art21 reading series.Marie Solis - a sonnet. *** BREAK ***Thanks to everyone who bought my little magazines! Yay, lunch money. I put some right back into Jackie M.'s fund for gas money etc.

Steve Arntson - Portal of Bones poem. I prompt. Actually during some of the above readings I was puzzling out Steve's splotchy handwriting in his tiny notebook. I love this poem. He left out a lot of bits. I could feel its layered rush.Me - a translation of nestor Perlongher's poem "Para Camila O'Gorman". It is weird and nonlinear. I can't remember if I've read it before, here. I kind of garbled it. Oh well. All my recent work is way too long to read here so it's translations away!Person whose name I just can't remember. OMG. I should. I have only known her for 4 years. Judith? Oh hell. I'm senile. She read 2 poems. Prophecies and healings. Katrina. Streetcar.Mary Marcia Casoly - Pomo poem written at/about Asilomar. about objects and stuff. I often like her poems' odd jumping around, very ethereal. They come at you sideways. This one did not grab me... a couple of lines did but I can't remember thm. Kathy Abelson - family poem. a memoir about moving to Los Altos or Sunnyvale back when it was all orchards. Actually, this is another very typical thread of what I think of as typical Waverley poems. It's a thing they have going on. Exploration of memoir and family memories, especially connections with the dead and time. Everyone quick go read "Remembrance of Things Past."Jean Chacona - "Unity" . Jean has a very strong particular individual voice, quiet and definite. She works in an orchid greenhouse, I think. Or used to. She's right in there with the meditative nature poem and Zen bonding with flowers or one particular leaf. She should team up with a painter for a poem/painting series.

At this reading I missed hearing Robert Pesich, David Cummings, Christine Holland, and Patrick Daly. I haven't been able to come to Waverley very often this year because of my school schedule in the spring, and then doing hurricane relief work and getting really sick this fall. So I felt like I didn't get my fix! They had better all read next time or there will be hell to pay.

Oh yeah I have one more slightly catty thing to say. It doesn't make it poetry just 'cause you leave out the "the"s. Remember that now. If you're doing that to make your poetry seem less prosy - a noble goal - you need more radical surgery. Leaving out pronouns is just as bad. I'm not sure exactly what to tell people. Go read some super tight good poetry and diagram its sentences? Or its lack of sentences? Rewrite two of your lines 10 different ways? Maybe take that good poem and mess it up by rewriting two of its lines to be as bad as possible? I should come up with an exercise for it.

Monday, December 05, 2005

I'll miss Anatole. He livened up the Not Yet Dead Poets Society of Redwood City for so many years!At readings I would often beg his tiny, thick notebook and read through it. What excellent sonnets! He was a well-read, masterful formalist with a great sense of humor - I especially liked his dirty limericks about Milton. It seemed like he was always winning Esperanto haiku contests - he was just that sort of person - truly interesting and quirky. Hopping around madly, hyper, a little guy in glasses with a neat beard, sharp-tongued and sparkly. After he moved to Sacramento, he'd take the bus all the way back to Redwood City to come to the monthly readings of the Society he founded. He came to the Chimera Books translations readings, too, and at times to Waverley.

This Wednesday at the Main Street Gallery in Redwood City, at 7pm, there will be a reading - featuring Steve Arntson, but also I am sure there will be many tributes to Anatole during the open mike.

Anatole Taras Lubovich...Was born on March 9, 1937, in Ukraine. During World War II, Anatole and his family were interned in a prison camp and following the war lived in refugee camps in Germany. By the time the family emigrated to the United States in 1950, Anatole had become fluent in several languages and had developed his lifelong love of words. He eventually studied 14 languages, with a particular passion for English which he spoke and wrote with precision, wit and elegance. He loved literature, particularly poetry and the plays of Shakespeare. He received a degree in musical theater from San Francisco State and appeared in numerous theatrical productions.

Anatole worked for many years as an engineer and a teacher, but it is as a poet that he will most be remembered. He was published in anthologies and journals, won several awards, and was featured at readings. Anatole translated poetry into English from Ukrainian and other languages. He was founder of the Not Yet Dead Poets Society on the Peninsula and, after moving to Sacramento, became active in the local poetry community. He was also active in the local Humanist organization. He was an Esperantist, a philatelist, an opera lover, and an ardent bibliophile. Anatole passed away on November 16, 2005, as a result of complications following coronary bypass surgery. He is survived by his sisters, Lily Empie of Wassila, Alaska, and Rose Wirolubowich of Oakland, and by his significant other, Do Gentry, of Sacramento.

Published in the Sacramento Bee on 11/23/2005.

I feel like I should post something by him, but all I have is his "Ten Suggestions for Reading Poetry at Open Mike".

STAY AWAKE. When the emcee calls on you to read, be ready with a legible, familiar copy in hand. Shuffling through papers shows you're not with it, wastes time and is inconsiderate. If you've got nothing to read, dont. It's cool to come only to hear others; actually, it's more of a compliment. Don't read a poem written by another dude just to read something, and nev er read some crap you just scribbled on a napkin. Take it home; in time, you may turn it into a poem, but not tonight. Show respect for the art.

BE COOL. Don't get shook up - there's nothing to be afraid of. You are among friends who are dying to hear you. What's the worst thing that could happen? If you should make a fool of yourself, no big deal - that won't be the first time, will it?

DON'T RUN YOUR MOTOR IN IDLE. Keep an introduction, if any, very short. Do not apologize for your work, offer excuses or long descriptions of circumstances and the process of writing. Such explanations are seldom called for, and seldom will they result in your work being viewed in a better light.

DON'T SAY WHAT YOU'RE GONNA SAY. Your piece shoudl say it for you. If it does not, take another look at it. But, if the poem contains a strange word, comes in some special form, or has some other kind of weirdness, where it would be a help to the listener to be prepared or warned, point it out, by all means.

KEEP TRACK OF TIME. Follow the rules of the program; don't abuse t hem. If the emcee lets you read one poem, read one poem. If the limit is five minutes, read four, not six. Exceptions should be cleared with the emcee before, not at the time of, reading. Time your poems beforehand. Keep in mind that any introduction is a part of your allotted time. Don't try to wow the audience with the volume of your works; leave some for next time.

READ SLOWLY AND CLEARLY. Do not hurry. Read in a voice loud and clear enough so that the farthest listener will understand you without strain. Do not swallow the initial or final sounds. Mumbling is for prayers. Mumbled recitation is a waste of time of both the reader and the listener.

DO IT WITH FEELING. Put life into your words. Make it easy for the audience to feel the cadence and grasp t he meaning. Treat poetry as art. If you can't communicate the meaning of your work, how can the other cats make any sense of it? Nothing is more boring than hearing words mouthed off monotonously and mechanically.

DON'T MAKE 'EM PUKE. Different themes and styles are expected and welcome. Although neither the subject matter nor the vocabulary is censored, it's a good idea beffore reading to check out the crowd as to what the prevailing attitude of the people you are about to entertain seems to be. Do not test the hearers' tolerance by grossing them out with gratuitous obscenitites. Don't make a mockery of the art and you won't be remembered as "The Gross One."

DON'T SPLIT before the program is over. Reading your piece and then leaving without hearing those who follow is a major breach of etiquette. It is likewise a bad scene to arrive late just to hear yourself.

COME BACK (unless asked not to). It is hoped that your reading will provide pleasure and that you will enjoy hearing others. Introduce yourself to and make friends with poets in your community. Contribute to the program with your presence and support.

Friday, December 02, 2005

You know that dumb story about how the universe rests on the back of a turtle and then the turtle is standing on another turtle, and it's turtles all the way down?

People tend to take a particular rhetorical stance when talking about women's writing. Even I do this. Even critics I admire the most. I was just reading this wonderful excerpt from Vicky Unruh's book which will come out next spring. Take a look! The preface is titled "The "Fatal Fact" of the New Woman Writer in Latin America, 1920s-1930s". Fifteen years ago, Unruh wrote a book called "Latin American Vanguards" in which women appear in one sentence - a sentence that denied they fit properly into the Vanguard genre. Now she's writing this book, which I can't wait to read, about women writers in that same era! In the preface I think she is circling dangerously close to saying that women only in the 20s just started literary life... But she completely avoids saying that, and instead talks about women as choosing to occupy a particular position in a performative, public, literary conversation. The book looks great. I am never going to hit this level of scholarly academic articulation, maybe. Yet I'm writing the same sort of ideas, and what's more, I'm acting on them. I'm sharing that set of assumptions and theory, sharing that critical stance, and putting them into practice, as a poet, translator, critic, and editor.

Since I am researching the conversations not just of the 20s but of some decades earlier I am extremely wary of making claims about the Newness of anything - as people so often do. I guess what I'm trying to say is that- when people MAKE those claims, be very suspicious. I hope other critics follow Unruh; I hope it's a general trend, and people will stop saying "Before this writer, women just didn't write, and weren't educated; how unfortunate" or "And here is the moment when love poetry began". Acknowledge a little ignorance on your own part, instead. (I can't tell you how many people think there was Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, and then there was nothing for a long time because women were just so terribly oppressed, and then there was Delmira Agustini or Gabriela Mistral. Maddening! It's okay not to know, but it's not okay to claim you know when you don't and to base a lot of assumptions on that.)

Here's an example. Maria Monvel started off her 1930 preface to "Poetisas de América" by celebrating the huge numbers of Latin American women poets, and wondering with a dismissive shrug why Spain lacks them. She comes up with an elaborate explanation of why this is so, and then mentions the few exceptions Spain has in her opinion. Other than those three women she "lets in" to the club of Real Women Writers, it's like there's a blank. Maybe she didn't know; maybe she was deliberately creating a blank space in history. Either way, it's criminal.

I'm looking at some of my xeroxed pages from a book I found, from 1915, called "Antología de Poetisas Líricas", a huge book in two volumes; it was published by the Real Academia Española. It's full of poetry by Spanish women from the 16th and 17th centuries. (In fact I bet you could make a strong argument that what Cervantes was making fun of - was them and their romances. Classic "make fun of women's popular successful writing" stance. Surely someone's said this.) I feel like listing a few of their names:

That's just part of the first page of the table of contents of a 1000 page book. Okay? And the hundreds of Spanish women poets in there are just the few who got published in their time, and who survived the erasure of history. Think how many more their probably were!

Or if you read about French feminism and feminist writers and movements and poets ... and you keep looking further and further back... you will finally get to the 18th century... and think you can say "And then it began." But no. Keep looking and you find more. I have ceased to believe in a beginning.

Monday, November 28, 2005

This Is Important by F.A. Nettlebeck. Half a sheet of letter paper, xeroxed, cut the long way and folded accordion-style. Tiny poems.

WHEN

you travel fora distance and youdon't see any bones,you worry, becausethen you are lost.

Okay, not my favorite poem in the world, but I like the idea of these little scraps floating around the world! Nettlebeck's work is often amazing. This Is Important looks to have come from the 80s in Santa Cruz. Last year I saw Nettlebeck read at Art 21 in Palo Alto - he came out from Arizona or Colorado or somewhere on a visit - and he blew me away. It was like a scruffy, stinking, roaring tiger at a Persian cat show. He came complete with drunken shit-kicker girlfriend who heckled everyone and asked them if they were dead. (As it is generally a lovely yet WASPy crowd, quiet and solemn as church.) Meanwhile Nettlebeck was ranting from his novel with sort of time travelling scungy teenagers and reminiscings of the 70s Santa Cruz poetry scene and the bones of Ginsberg. There is something to ephemeral slips of paper and to experiences like that mad, mad reading in the art gallery!

Inevitable - writings by Sabrina C. Letter paper, halved the short way, folded, and stapled on the short edge handout not booklet style, xerox.

Roller blade fire mama, spandex short and legs hard with gleaming muscle, the shine shifting, blinding ants for a second...

Sabrina tries hard to capture each moment, each person passed in the street, the blinding sweat rollerblade beauty and the "lonely aluminum wolves", "how they cross and uncross streets in nervous jittered unlacings". Strong fierce lovely poems... I like the roughness of the work and of the book. My favorite of her poems I've seen so far is the long one in Inevitable that starts:

Now the key has to be ready and accessible between fingers three and four by the time I've even rounded my blockright hand in my right pocket, I've got the lock down of my mental security in check.

She describes how she pictures the locks and the sequence of actions necessary to get into her apartment's gates and doors; in the middle of the imagining and unlocking, she describes her enemy. It's eerie for me to read, as I also wrote a long poem about this very thing.

I know the way they look in the suntheir eyes downcast and watchingtheir sideways following heet whispers as they warm you up for their licking shadows

I know the way that they plan their sentences to follow my passing like a scentand their lingering desires that catch me like ghosts of stink perfume

I know the rooms they live inboxes of heated sheetsstained with the imprints of their turning night bodiestheir hands praying to crucifixeswhile creating the beads of rosariesin cream and liquid testimonies of faith

they are praying to something they will never getand though I am nameless, I am it

That's quite powerful. Do you see the roughness, but the power of the roughness? I think the power would disappear if smoothed. I saw John Lee Hooker play once, and it was like that, rough, smoky, crackling, noisy, with extra bits. It had noise in the signal.

Aw yeah. Should tattoo that on myself, for when the revolution comes. Why wait for the revolution? It's a good motto anytime. Thunder shower! Hah! It expresses such affection and boldness, an intimate relationship with the world. Like he's saying, "Oh, you!" and patting the storm on its head. Or anything that makes a Big Noise to scare you. You don't have to be scared - says Cid. And it's conveyed in so few words! Go ahead and try to do that.

I'm a sucker for this poem:

Someone willsweep the fallenpetals away

away. I know, I know. Weight ofred shadows.

I feel oldfashioned for liking Corman so much. I'm not sure how much of my liking is in the poems and how much is in his little books and his philosophies. I'm sad that he died a couple of years ago and I didn't even know. We were writing letters for a while, and he gave me permission to reprint his translation of Lu Chi's Wen Fu, a work on writers and writing.

He was the sort of person who delighted in writing to everyone, sending off little paper doves, emitting poems and interesting thoughts to anyone who might find them. Whole chunks of the letters would repeat themselves sometimes. As if he wanted to make sure it got through to someone, like repeated coded messages from a submarine... He would have had a lovely blog.

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Have you ever written - and published - a line that later gives you a hot blush of shame? For me it's always some cheap trick of rhetoric that seemed like a good idea when it spewed off my fingertips into TexEdit, some utterly dorktastic 9th grade journalism thing, a throwaway bit of demogoguery that mixes the trite and pompous. I can think of two of them right now that I'd love, love, love, to delete from the face of the earth.

Other lines I've written stick in my head more pleasantly. I'm in love with them despite their technical flaws, and I don't want to abandon their imperfections.

This happened to me today. I was driving along, thinking about poetry. A poem I wrote 10 years ago, "White Horse," started running through my head. I haven't thought of it or looked at it for quite a while, though I tried reading it aloud at a poetry slam in San Jose once - my first and only poetry slam, and it was the wrong kind of poem and I hadn't memorized it.

Things bothered me about this poem: I kept plonking back and forth between prosy explaining-language that embarrasses me, like:

her children fight, complain, scream,her mother and sisters bicker far into the night, chainsmoking,

and dense stuff that I approve of still, like:

Resignation bright as a trumpet, victim-shiny,

It became completely obvious to me how I wanted to fix the poem and save it from my own clumsiness. Because it's good, really, especially the very end:

Your hands, Diana, pull the lifefrom his warm animal eyes, his skincollapses, the bones protrudingunwind, unwrap themselves into cracklingmummy bandages, deeds to property, carregistrations, proof of insurance, diplomas,credit reports, all fluttering up and around your handslike paper doves, and the moon dissolves into its ownbeams. My wet puddle self is drawn up in the samelife-line, into the horse's skin, which,reanimate, boneless, sways to accept her weight,all fluid and alert, and we are togetherrollicking off into the moonless night.

"Off into" bothers me, and yet I don't want to abandon it, for its trueness to my own speech patterns and for its rhythm and emphasis.

There's other poems I know I can't rewrite. I have to start over, and start somewhere else.

At that time 10 years ago my poetics were focused around narrative movement. I wanted each poem, without being prose, to have something happen. The mood and images had to be in a story, and that story had to be something beyond "Oooo, look, I just had a vague epiphany." I wrestled with that one for a while.

But later, I spouted off thusly, in one of my "Hot Air" essays. I think this one was in Caesura magazine:

Poetry swirls and leaps and turns in on itself. It should be dense, rich, layered. Dense poetry rewards study and thought. It should not pace – not even long narrative poetry. It changes state. It boils and sublimates.

A prose poem is something different; a vignette, or a collage, not an excerpt from a novel.

Look at the poem. If it can be written out as a paragraph – with a paragraph's pacing and sensibility – then make it so.

(You see what I mean about my tendency to bombast... But I was trying to say something steely-eyed about Bad Poetry, without citing any actual examples of bad poetry, those ones I'd been hearing that were driving me crazy...)

And then suddenly I moved on to writing very long poems, listening to the structure of long poems. I love how certain poems move in and out of a subject, returning to touch base and then spinning out into the distance, never quite letting you go - but you have to pay attention! But no, actually, you don't. The long poem allows space for spacing out. You can listen to it, and as in listening to baroque music, your mind can spin out into some fascinating direction and then be reeled or yanked back in, back into the present of the poet's voice. At readings at Waverley Writers, and then later at Art21, and the Saturday Poets, I heard Steve Arntson recite his long, long poems about the coast of Oregon and Kirk and Spock and the Wizard of Oz, and immediately classed him with Kerouac, Ginsberg, Grahn, in his mastery of the form of the long poem. It was instructive for me. I have his CD, "Poem Dreams with Imaginary Companions" and another huge audio tape with the oregon poems.

At the time I was translating a poem that takes 20 minutes to read aloud, that is all in rhymed couplets and mean to be sung: "Florentino y el Diablo." Now, I am translating Nestor Perlongher's long poem "Cadáveres", which spins off in baroque fashion and "yanks" you back with repetition. Each verse - and the lengths and rhythms vary - ends with the words, "Hay Cadáveres". In a way I felt... Oh, this is so rude ... but I'm a snob and I love the clusterfuck density of Perlongher's shorter, more cryptic poems where many things happen at once, like a 10-dimensional cryptogram, and I remember first reading "Cadáveres" and thinking "Ha. That's a cheap trick. Here's his popular poem." But really I love that poem.

Believe it or not, I have a point I'm winding up to make. Recently I was talking to someone, I think Serene who does the Nomad Cafe reading series, about our love of "that 70s thing" that is sort of like beat poets, or like the next generation of poets who obviously love the beats but who are not quite beats, and we think of ourselves as continuing in that vein. I am about ready to declare that whole Thing to be part of what Cuban and Argentinian critics call the neobarroque. At some point last year, Hilary Kaplan turned me on to her translation of Alexei Bueno's amazing long poem, "The Decomposition of Johann Sebastian Bach", so there's a Brazilian neobarroco writer for you.... Once I started reading about neobarroco, I realized that's what I'm doing. For a year I've been thinking of my own poetics as part of the neobaroque, but it's been a private process of consideration. I should write this up more thoroughly, with examples.

It is like the beautiful moment during Quetzalcoatl's version of "El Gabán y el gavilán" where the song is interrupted by the harp spiralling off into something hesitant, like a haze of a chain of thought that's almost broken...

Anyway, I really hate it when people call me a language poet. I'm a neobaroque poet. And in the best of my nascent traditions, I will promise to write about all this tomorrow. Then tomorrow, I'll have a new and shinier thought.

I will also promise to discuss Steve Arntson's work in detail. It's astonishing to me when I'm in a room full of people who seem not to realize that whenever he reads it's a Momentous Occasion. If I ever help to get his poems published or collected or recorded I will be very, very happy. The world is missing out and I can't stand for his work to disappear into the fog of memory.

Monday, November 14, 2005

I'm sick of my own longing for a "real book". Yes, I suck at sending out my work. For 20 years I've made little booklets and magazines - sometimes bad and sloppy, sometimes good and sloppy, sometimes, I think, very beautiful... And I still can't believe the scrambling after legitimacy that I see and frankly, that I feel myself do at times. Someone says a nasty thing about "self publishing" or vanity presses, and I know what they mean. They mean writing that's so bad you're embarrassed to be on the same planet with it.

But anyone can declare themselves a press.

When vanity has capital, it becomes legitimate. That's disgusting and unacceptable! We should be careful not to equate money with literary quality. On the other hand, hating the "legitimate" is no better than its opposite. I wish that people would exercise their own judgement in poetry; would take pleasure in excellent work whether it is found in odd corners or trumpted from the rooftops with vast marketing power.

Look at the snobbery around web-based publishing. I predicted ten years ago that it would be coming to a head right around now. Maybe I was too optimistic, because I hear sneers at web journals from all over despite the amazing greatness of what's out there. My anthology project would never have gotten this far without places like Palabra Virtual, for example. In science fiction, I've been reading for a book award, and have found almost all the best short fiction online, in Strange Horizons or on SciFi.com.

Collectivity also does not guarantee quality. A magazine or a press run by several famous people with reasonably good taste doesn't automatically produce better work than something edited and published by one or two people. In fact, the more people you have on a project, the greater the likelihood that some crap creeps in, because someone's ex-boyfriend or old teacher or classmate can't be left out without great offense and scandal. Editing magazines or anthologies is a literary art, sometimes done well as a collaboration, sometimes fine as a solo production. (I tend to believe most strongly in tight collaborations that are heavy on process and commitment - but there are editors whose taste and judgement I trust more than others. )

So if we know good and bad when we see them, how come good work doesn't always bubble up to the top, like some kind of perfect libertarian merit-based fermentation process? Physical books and magazines are ephemeral, I think more so than earlier in this century. Libraries don't have space. Archives aren't as accessible as they'd like to be. Bookstores and publishing are a travesty, a running sore. More poetry books get printed and destroyed than get printed and sold.

It seems obvious that we need different models of publishing and reading.

In blogging, a new literary genre that is only beginning to gain recognition, it's almost all self-publishing. It is now incredibly simple, and free, to make your writing available. You can go to the nearest public library and blog all you want from a public terminal for most of the world to read as they please. How do you, then, as a reader, find what's good? (I'm not thinking yet about "How do you, as a writer, make money?") The search engine model is to create an algorithm, a formula, weighing various factors to assign relative ranking to web pages. This becomes a bit of a popularity contest, and it's possible to rig it just like you can rig the literary game by all your friends also being writers and critics... I imagined a few years ago in my paper "A search engine model of literary quality and intertextuality" that we could make open source, flexible algorithms to make infinite, individual, multiple, dynamic ranking systems for literature, for anything textual, so that the question "What is good?" could be rephrased easily, constantly, as "What is good for this particular purpose, at this moment, to whom, and according to whom?

So, to ask this question another way, how can I find some good poetry on the web? There's so much of it. No one's controlling what is "publishable" quality and what isn't. How can I filter out the crap?

I think granularity and tagging might help with this problem. A sort of "Technorati for poetry" or for literature in general would be very helpful. Imagine if every poem published on the web, anywhere, were marked up as a poem, tagged as a poem. And then imagine if one's identity as a critic and writer were also a tag. Instantly you have solved the problem of editing, publishing, judgement. You find a person whose work you like as your starting point, then you see if you like their judgement of what's good, and look at their tag clouds and their rankings, and keep poking, following, and adjusting until you have your own custom "magazine" of what you love best. Your own reputation then depends on your own judgement of what you say you love best. If you think about it, this imaginary data structure already exists, but it's imaginary. It exists already in informal social networks, in your trust of what your friend thinks of the latest book as well as what some pompous ass in the NY Times Book Review says about it. I just want this beautiful data structure, this social network of literary criticism, to have a home and good tools.

My understanding of all this is somewhat based on reading people like Eugene E. Kim of eekspeaks, and Mary Hodder of Napsterization, and that whole crowd that I met at BarCamp and BlogHer, too many to list here. But I have been writing and thinking about "it" for years without much connection to the places where most of the intense conversations are happening.

"The verses of poetesses generally aren't women's verses. One doesn't sense in them any female feeling. The women poets don't talk like women. They are, in their poetry, neuter beings. They're artists without sex. The poetry of women is dominated by an idiotic modesty. And that's why they lack in humanity and power. While the male poet displays his "I", the poetess hides and mystifies herself. She wraps up her soul, her life, her truth, in the grotesque tunics of the conventional." [translation by Liz Henry]

I don't know the year that Mariátegui wrote this essay, but most likely sometime in the 1920s. It's fascinating to contrast his criticism of women with that of other (male) critics who run off at the mouth about the oversexed women poets who go too far with their passion and who can't seem to write about anything important, anything other than love. I had just been writing about him in conjunction with Magda Portal, María Wiesse, Angela Ramos, Alicia del Prado, and other women who were publishing in Amauta, a Peruvian magazine. He was the only man mentioned in conjunction with these very political, activist women, and I wondered if he had some interesting take on feminism. Well, he sure sounds jerky in that one excerpt, kind of like he wants a free show from these un-neuter women who boldly strip themselves of their tunics...

Last week I translated Magda Portal's poem "Liberación". And check out these lines:

One day I'll be free... I'll be free, I know it,with a huge smile that flowers from the heart,with a huge smile that I don't have today.And then I won't have the ghost of my shame,the coward silence that tamps down Emotion.Someday I'll have achieved the truth of my Self![forgive the translation... a crude first draft.]

Wow! That just can't be a coincidence. It sounds like she wrote it in response to Mariátegui. A little bit of poking around on the web and I found this fascinating essay by him all about Portal's poetry, comparing her to Agustini, Ibarbourou, and others: 7 Ensayos de Interpretación de la Realidad Peruana, from 1928. Mari&ategui has a huge crush!

I find it annoying how he says her work isn't "descended" from any other women -- as if feminist geneologies would demean the work or the poet, and as if she sprung up out of nowhere and as if no other woman anywhere were writing like that. Praise becomes isolation; isolation becomes tokenization. I understand that his motivations were partly nationalist, but from my perspective, I see every introduction to women's work from this era saying "How come this woman poet has no equal, no precursor? Where did she come from? " as having a subtext of assigning freakishness to women writers.

But then, the more I look, the more I find that these women writers often were surrounded by other writing women. They're not left out because they're trivial; they're left out because non-triviality is defined to be male.

Friday, November 11, 2005

I've been working on my anthology project for over a year. It's of poems by Latin American women writers - well, Spanish America - and is focused on work published between 1880 and 1930. My goal is to give a fair representation of what was being published by women in that era. I've done a lot of research! And I could spend years expanding this project; it's fascinating and there is a ton of material. To do this project right, I would need to go spend a couple of months in various big libraries. I'd like to visit the Benson Latin American collection in Austin; I'm familiar with it because I used to work in that library system. I'd like to go to big libraries in Buenos Aires and Uruguay and Cuba and Guatemala, to look at copies of women's magazines and other literary magazines from the turn of the century.

For now, I have quite a lot to work with. I have good work from about 40 or 50 poets, and many more I haven't yet been able to judge. I've translated a smaller core group of 21 poets, made short bios for them, and compiled lists of their work, where I could find that information. Most of these poets are not well known. You have your famous ones in roughly this order:

I'd say that's it for the "known" writers that you would expect from an academic who is a latin americanist, or is from Latin America. Storni, especially, was hip recently. And a few poets in the U.S. will have read selected translations of Mistral. Usually the dippiest and stupidest of her poems.

Beyond that, people seem to know Juana de Ibarbourou; Salome Ureña, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. Correct me if I'm wrong! The other writers are either little-known even to most literary people, or they're known (or known of) by people from their own countries. This is not surprising; academia rewards specialization. People tend to become experts in a particular time, place or "literary movement"; even so narrow as to study a particular writer. The mindset of the ambitious anthologist must be quite different.

I find most of my "unknown" women poets only in anthologies that are country-specific, and often only in old anthologies from 1930. There is a certain sentimentality attached to them, as they might have been poems memorized in grade school for recitation.... again, the poems best known are not the best poems.

So what do I mean by "the best poems"? On some level, I have an absolute artistic standard, a very traditional "golden bookshelf" one, that I'm judging by. It's elitist and snobby. I like density of language and meaning, a "leaping" quality, and intertextuality. I like a surprise. I value poems that are exciting to me as a poet - and value them over poems that might be more exciting to a general audience. This kind of discernment is good to have, but it can also be a liability or an obstacle to interpretive vision and judgement; it can be blatantly classist; it's like wearing blinders. Steeping myself in non-elite traditions gives me other standards to judge by; like with literary genre, you can't judge one sort of thing by the standards of another. In other words, I believe that literary critics, anthologizers, and teachers have to get over that sense, or not be limited by it.

On another level, I want to find "what's interesting to people now" including anything that I think will be unexpected. If I see (and I do) that "latin american women's writing" is being marketed in the U.S. as having a certain kind of eroticism, then I want to find poems that are metaphysical and abstract. When I read prefaces to other anthologies that say that women mostly write love poetry that's overly sentimental and twee, and that men's poetry is more important because it's political, then I want to find some political poems by women. Whenever I make up my mind to look for something that I've read doesn't exist, frankly, I've found it! That is very satisfying to my notions of feminism.

Overt feminist content often interests me in a poem, so while Adela Zamudio's "Nacer Hombre" doesn't make my snooty elitist filter, it is boldly feminist. It has also been an extremely famous poem for over 100 years. That alone gives it historical interest. And when I show it to people, they tend to respond with surprise and pleasure that such a poem was written at all in 1887:

Actually, these sentiments were not so rare as people think. It is a sad symptom of the state of history, and of feminist history, that it should be so surprising.

I look for works that are representative of a particular kind of writing. Here's a perfect example: Emma Vargas Flórez de Arguelles, born in 1885 in Colombia. I found a few of her poems in an old anthology of Colombian women poets. She never published a book, but had poetry in magazines and newspapers and was part of a family of poets. That's all I know about her. If I could go to Colombia, or if I spent a week digging, I'm sure I'd find more about her life and more of her work. The poem I am including in the anthology is called "Manos femeniles." It's totally barfy. I'll give you some of my English translation:

Professional hands that instead of a needletake up the pen, driven by longing,and instead of embroidery, shape verses;you're the busy secretaries of the soul,that in happy times, peaceful, createharmonious verses from honey and vinegar.

It gets worse. Lilies, mothers, children, Christ, butterflies, shy maidens, fragility, embroidery, stars, pearls, honor, and "holy obedience" all make cameo appearances and one is slightly tempted to think of the word "doggerel". But then I think back to Longfellow and Tennyson, who are just as barfy and doggerel-prone and yet who are still judged to be "good" though out of fashion. If they were women they would disappear into the mists. How unfair! And Emma Vargas actually fits the stereotype of "women's verses" that make people roll their eyes. Shouldn't we actually take a long hard look at such poems before we judge them?

Indeed when I look deeper at "Manos femeniles", it's got something going on. I realize now, from reading a lot of poems like this, that there's something similar to the U.S. women's temperance movement going on; that Vargas is part of the feminism that thought of women as essentially holy and better than men; the famous "angel in the house". The poem addresses famous men directly, challenging them to think of women poets as interpreters of a sort of fragile women's dream-world, as if women are more directly in touch with the land of fantasy and imagination than men can be. In a modernist aesthetic, this is like saying that men can't be good poets! They're too sullied by gross impurity of the world and of just being men, apparently. Men sin a lot, and have battles and make a lot of noise. Women care for the wounded and for children, and are Christlike, while also sort of magically channelling poet-energy from the stars, from flowers, jewels, and from, you know... modernist fairyland. Then she winds up the poem with a rousing call to sisterly action:

You have to admit that's kind of cool! And while by my absolutist golden-bookshelf standards, I would sneer at it if it were written last year and read at a poetry slam, when I picture it in the context of its time, it's interestingly radical.

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

I enjoyed being in Montreal, surrounded by people speaking French. It was good to be in another country.

I could understand a few words and the gist of a sentence, but only after a 10-second time delay where I tried to spell words in my head. I can stumble through a French newspaper article, or follow a poem along with its translation into Spanish or English, but the same words spoken aloud - they often don't compute!

My own voice sounded harsh and unlovely in my ears, flat and strident, after a day or so listening to French and Spanish. It was embarrassing evidence that I am an uncouth U.S. American. I might as well have been saying "Gee! Gosh! I guess so! W'all, I'll be!" and slapping my knee while twiddling a strand of hay between my teeth, right off the set of "Hee Haw". We have a lot of reasons right now to be embarrassed to be USians. Suddenly I could not escape being identified with a category I find distasteful... any personal or subcultural identities I have were subsumed into national identity, and into stereotype.

On the street and on the Metro I played guessing games - who was going to speak French? Was it possible to tell by how people dressed? I think there were correlations, but I didn't have enough experience to guess right.

Strangers generally spoke to me in French, and I learned to say "bon jour" and "bon soir" but then there'd have to be a switch to English or shrugging. I wondered if people were reading me as French-speaking, or if it is standard in the Downtown and Village Gai areas to start off with French either because of the population there or for political reasons. Here, if someone speaks Spanish to me, it is either because they don't speak English or because they have "read" my race incorrectly.

In the Metro I overheard a tour guide - in English - explaining to a group that the west side of one of the islands, the English-speaking side, just seceded from Montreal and is now its own city.

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

My favorite readings from ALTA were translations of poems by Julio Martínez Mesanza and Luis Cernuda. Readers were often grouped by language or by country; I made an effort to go to the Spanish-language readings, especially if they were heavy on poetry and light on fiction.

Don Bogen translated Martínez Mesanza's decasyllabic lines into blank verse, into deftly rolling yet dense & compact lines that lent dignity to the work. Listening with concentration and focus is difficult. Even if I achieve it, the words slip away from me and I'm left with only impressions. I need to see the poems on the page. Unfortunately I lost my notebook where I jotted down some of Bogen's lines, but the originals are here:

His poems spoke of war: trenches, artillery, castles. knights, tapestries, goniometers; the language of war, of power and chaos, seemed doubly rooted in history and fantasy, catapulting the poem's metaphors into philosophical musings applicable to anyone's struggle in life.

I thought of the function of war, of battle, in poetry. Consider the symbolic and narrative value of combat in comic books or superhero stories. The battle is charged with meaning; the "action sequence" in a spy movie, in a western, when Wolverine fights his womanly arch-enemy and her razor claws, when Chow Yun-Fat and the gangster spray an endless hail of bullets around the church and he crawls blindly past his blind lover... Consider Arjuna's struggle, his moment of choice and judgement before the Battle of Kurukshetra in the Mahabharata. Combat, ultimately, is about that razor edge of consciousness, about decision using all possible information and experience.

Es poder una torre sobre rocas had a powerful impact. Maybe because I had just been working on a long poem about towers, or The Tower, what we think "tower" means; fictional towers of all kinds, tarot cards, the tower of babel, the Two Towers; and the tower's antidote, the rhizome. Something about the ephemeral quality of hearing, and my own bad memory, makes poetry hook unexpectedly into my own thought trains; on some level, I stop listening, I phase in and out of focus on the heard poem. This imperfection of understanding is productive. Later there is time enough to read the poem on the page and grasp it fully.

In fact, I don't like a poem that is simple enough to grasp fully on one hearing. How dull, how disappointing, how very like a sound bite! For example, the poem by the Bulgarian poet, who was certainly a nice guy and a sensitive poet, and perhaps a translator himself. But the very poem that listeners in two audiences sighed over, in appreciation and perhaps in relief that it could be understood, I found to be one of the worst I heard all weekend. It was quite short, and had something like this: "God is a child/making sand castles/ and doesn't understand/that he can control the waves..." I am a fan of the short poem as a form, but if it's short, it had better have some good thick ideas jam-packed into it, especially if it's one image and one metaphor. Songs don't have to be that simple. A poem you can understand completely in one hearing is poor food for poet's souls.

Monday, November 07, 2005

After the ALTA conference I'm all fired up about translation. In the next few days I'll be writing up my notes from the panels, hallway conversations, lunch dates, and bilingual readings.

I bounced around the conference spreading lots of ideas. One thing I love about ALTA is that it's not just for professional academics. Because it's so hard to make a living being a literary translator in the U.S., everyone has a day job. There's courtroom interpreters, surgeons, and high school foriegn-language teachers, heck, elementary school teachers. People's jobs tend to be in teaching, publishing, editing, or - like me - housewifing. Those mavericks do great work, and they get a lot of respect from the academics, who also tend to be the red-headed stepchildren of their departments; foreign language, Comp Lit, English, Composition, Creative Writing - none of them are quite the right fit and your translation might not be quite respectable, might not count so much towards your tenure. Of course there are execptions, and some people are lucky enough to be in one of the rare universities with a Translation Studies program.

Comparative Literature is the logical home for translators in academia. It's already cross-disciplinary. It's theory-heavy right now, and could use a little course correction, a little practical connection with the world. Translation, at least of living languages and authors, maintains a direct connection with literary communities. Take a look at the book Comparative Literature in an Age of Multiculturalism. It's a collection of short essays on Comp Lit, including a report on the state of the discipline from the 60s, 70s, and one from the 90s. (The 80s one is missing, because the Culture Wars were so intense.) If you look at the drafts of new American Comparative Literature Association essays available here: ACLA drafts that translation is being "noticed" more by Comp Lit. Maybe a shift in the discipline is happening, or should be happening. What does this mean for Comp Lit departments?

Comparative literature students and profs would benefit from learning more translation theory, and from doing translations. Translation theory and literary translators would benefit from thinking of their work as essentially comparative. What does that mean? As far as I understand it, it means keeping many factors in mind at the same time while doing your translation: your own subjectivity, the gaps in your knowledge, the depth or shallowness of your knowledge of other cultures and contexts. Seemingly unrelated areas of knowing can factor into a translation; though you're translating an Argentinian short story from 1920, your knowledge of Icelandic history or the Tale of Genji, as a comparatist, is going to deepen the work. Putting translation into Comp Lit as a discipline would revitalize Comp Lit, and would acknowledge the way that translation is a creative, critical, literary, and political act.

Thursday, October 13, 2005

I felt a moment's temptation to try and go see Mary Oliver. But what if she's a twit? It was rather upsetting when I went to hear Margaret Atwood, though we're all ambivalent about her these days for being a snotwad about science fiction some of the time, I still have my admirations... and she was cool, but came off as oddly stuckup for someone who is so boasty about growing up in the backwoods.

Anyway I have this nightmare-universe vision suddenly of Oliver being so eastcoast and upperclass that I will want to scream no matter how much i like her poetry. It's so unfair to say this; I know nothing about her!

Considering imitations. People who try to write like Oliver, they bother me more than people who try to write like Ginsberg. Why is that? Certain literary styles that are good in the original but when the emulators spring up, it makes it all seem cheap.

And I imitate her too including the yuppie moments of aetheticization and thoreau-like musing combined and the neat little wrap-up at the end. Sometimes I write that kind of poem and then I'm disgusted with myself. And then i know someone will publish it somewhere because it is easy to grok. It's simple and digestible. And then I feel dirty, a lowdown rotten dirty liar, because my moment of aestheticizing nature is essentially false given the way I live, in an urban/suburban environment, so that it's like this blinder-vision where I'm staring as if hypnotized at a tree or an acorn or a star, when all around me are streets and houses, bags of cheetos, paperclips, trashcans, dinner tables, people going to work. If I were actually living out in the woods like Thoreau it would seem more intellectually honest to write about the tree like it were the most important thing in my world. (Though I read all about how Thoreau's mom or aunt or someone would come and clean his house and bring him his dinner so he could loll about the trails gazing at groundhogs -- so he's rather bogus himself.)

This is not at all a new thought for me; I became obsessed with it when I was about 16 and I set out to try to aestheticize everything and ended up with a lot of that sort of poetry that exalts paperclips and trashcans to positions of tawdry glory. At that age I was filled with a lot of wild determinations like, "I'm going to combine Art and Science in a way heretofore never seen in the history of the entire world!"

And later I tried to feel a spiritual & poetic bond while musing on the nature of the artificial, the spirit of manufactured objects and mass production. I can get in that mode where an empty milk carton is a tragic miracle! The effort required to make it, its moldedness, its nearly severed connection with the things used to make it and with people. But central nature-y things come up, or one is just too conditioned to go around "feeling poetic" when the moon is up, or when gazing at the ocean with no pressure to go anywhere, and the moon and stars become poetic archetypes, part of a pantheon of symbology, and the trashcans, paperclips, urbanness, etc. are harder to internalize. And then one doubts completely whether the aestheticization of everything is a good idea at all! If we accept that poetic musing as part of the process of art or the point of art, then we're lost to poltitical awareness.

So, back to the small precious illusions about other poets: Part of the reason I can believe in Marge Piercy's poems is that I believe in the picture of her I have constructed, that she spends a lot of time in her garden, that she has a huge real-life commitment to composting her lettuce beds. I imagine her recycling everything, and wearing only all-cotton tunic-dresses made by non-sweatshop labor, and you know, the salty Cape Cod wind blowing in her hair. And it kinda ruins it when I imagine her going to K-mart and buying some socks, tampax, and a bag of cheetos and going home to eat the cheetos, grumpily pop some Midol, and watch Tivo-ed episode of "Cops" until she falls asleep in front of the TV, even though surely that or its Marge Piercy equivalent must happen. How unfair that my romantic myth of the poet should interfere with the poetry itself! And that the poetry should construct this unrealistic wind-blown portrait of the poet! Is that really necessary? I don't think it's right!

At poetry readings, part of what we like about them as poets -- I'm thinking of Waverley Writers here, or some other small "page poet" readings around the Bay Area -- is that we see evidence of other people who seem like regular cheeto-consuming people, confessing to those moments of tender aestheticization, of romanticizing some aspect of the world. And that makes them vulnerable, I think, and we mutually recognize the vulnerability of "being like that" and walking around in a sort of fog where we attach our attention to some object-- or situation --and stuff all this meaning into it. We're a little embarrassed. And yet we love it - and admire it when other people do it, no matter how it may seem to the rest of the world like pointless navel-gazing wankery.

Monday, August 22, 2005

When you read a book of poems, you know that someone else has likely read that book, so on one level you become a member of a community of people who have read it and developed a response to it. But you don't have much awareness of that community. Your membership is not active or visible.

For an example of readerly membership, consider old-fashioned library cards. When I was in grade school, I'd check a book out by signing my name on a lined index card that was in the front of the book. The librarian would take the card and date stamp it. I could see on the card in the book a list of everyone else who had read the book before me. I could make myself known to them, and I'd be known as a reader of that book by anyone who read it after me or who had the impulse to look at the card. In this way I became aware of other kids who shared my reading tastes, my interests; as meta-information one level removed I became aware that two or three other kids in the school read as much and as widely as I did.

A poetry reading or spoken word event creates a visible literary community. The sharing of information is visible. You know who's heard what you've heard. Even if you don't say anything, by attending the event you become engaged in public discourse, or potentially engaged.

In blogging communities, the visibility of readership creates strong reading communities. For example, I feel a kinship of shared knowledge with someone who has been a regular commenter on a blog that we both read. I can see not only that they read it, and not only the tenor of their responses, but a glimpse of their level of engagement with the text. I may not know their own blog or their work, but I have a textual relationship with that fellow commenter.

Wanting a lot of people to come to your reading goes way beyond wanting to feel a diva-like popularity. When people come to a reading, their presence magnifies the importance of the event in each others' eyes, because they personally become visible to a larger literary community. They have an opportunity to make connections with other listeners and to have conversations about the work. Events with only 6 people attending can be powerful too, if those 6 people respond strongly and put their information visibily into the mix. If they all go off and write reviews of the event, or poems in response to what they heard, or have a blog discussion the next day, then an event of literary importance has probably occurred.

In literature as it is treated in the literary-academic world, there are authors, readers/listeners, and critics. The categories overlap. It's particularly powerful when we see their strong overlap, for example when poets write poetry about other poets' poems, or when a novel has complex intertextual relationships. When this happens, we as readers realize we have a relationship to the text that is potentially creative and critical. In addition, the subjectivity of the critic is strongly exposed. We also as readers can now see something of the internal library, or the blogroll, the information feed, of the author. As a reader and critic, I want to know the information feed of whoever I'm reading.

I take notes at readings and think about what I'm hearing, about patterns and fashions in poetry. It's difficult to write frankly about what's good and bad in other people's writing without being offensive or hurting people. I'm hoping I can strike a balance: focus on the positive without pulling my punches. I'd like to practice exercising judgement and drawing other people into critical thinking about poetry and translation.

Here's a list of some of the readings and open mics that I have been going to over the last 5 years in the Bay Area:

Waverly Writers, in Palo AltoArt 21, also in Palo AltoWriters With Drinks, San FranciscoKvetsh, San FranciscoEdinburgh Castle, San FranciscoThe Saturday Poets, in BurlingameSan José Art League, in the Minor Street house around 2000-2002Willow Glen Books, San JoséPoetry Center San José Redwood City Not Dead Yet Poets' SocietyVarious reading at City Lights, Modern Times, Valencia St. Books, Chimera, Kepler's, & other bookstores.

I hope I can expand this list and take a peek into other readings, other scenes that have their own particular thing going. I recently wrote an article for a book on the Waverley Poets on this specific subject: the academic/literary page poets and the spoken word poets don't have a context for judging each others' works, because they don't know each others' information feeds.

I'd like to get some of the people in different scenes around the Bay Area reading or listening to each other, and looking for each others' ways of being intertextual and literary.